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Over The Hedge

Original post made
by no name, Los Altos,
on Jun 12, 2006

I found 'Over the Hedge' to be so sad. As a Farm and Wilderness guide at Hidden Villa, we have lunch with the children, and more times than not, the kids pull out junk food or seriously processed food from their packs. And that's exactly what the whole movie featured and, in my opinion, promoted. Junk food, yum.

Posted by Daniel Rand
a resident of South of Midtown
on Jun 12, 2006 at 11:18 pmDaniel Rand is a registered user.

Wait ... weren't the "glutonous" junk-food-eating suburbanites the villains in this film, and the simple, foraging critters the heroes? Not sure how that promotes junk-food eating -- I actually had the opposite reaction. Made me feel like us humans should think twice about what we gorge on and consider the wilderness and animals around us before we buy big SUVs and pounds of Funyons. Sorry, but I felt this movie actually had a good message about avoiding saturation and over-eating. And how about "Cars"? A pleasant, family film to remind us how dependent we are on oil. Maybe animated films aren't sending the good messages they used to...

I agree that the overt message was supposed to be that junk food was bad, but if product placements (& even celebrities smoking or wearing diamonds) in movies sells products, then doesn't watching 90 minutes of junk food have an impact? But maybe I missed something important, as I had trouble staying awake.

It's true about the product placement aspect. As much as I enjoyed the humor and camaraderie of the characters in the movie, as well as the satirical swipes at the humans, I also came away wanting to eat ... Nacho chips! And I'm not even a junk food eater.

Posted by Dipti Joshi
a resident of Palo Verde
on Jun 17, 2006 at 8:50 am

I thought the point was to stress how much "junk" a human tends to eat / collect. True - the animals were in quest of junk food (and specific brands of it !!! ) - but their source was the human neighborhood. This was put together in a very good and effective way !

I think you may be thinking from the adult perspective. A little kid won't clean junk out of his room because of this movie. He's going to eat chips because the cute little creature said he loves them. Have we become so accustomed to covert advertising that we don't see it anymore? Anyway, I only got a couple mild chuckles from the movie. I do NOT recommend it.

My kids and I loved Over the Hedge. I think the detractors need to lighten up and stop obsessing about the hidden political or commercial messages that they imagine are encoded into kid movies. If you don't want your kids to eat junk food, don't feed them junk food.

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